Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Memory devices are employed in many types of electronic devices, such as computers, cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), data loggers, and navigational equipment, just to name a few examples. Among such electronic devices, various types of nonvolatile memory devices may be employed, such as NAND or NOR flash memories, static random access memory (SRAM), dynamic random access memory (DRAM), and phase-change memory, just to name a few examples. In general, writing or programming processes may be used to store information in such memory devices, while a read process may be used to retrieve stored information.
In some applications, a memory device may be shared among multiple central processing units (CPUs) and information processors (IPs). Information stored on such a shared memory device may be exchanged among the multiple CPUs and IPs. A system on a chip (SOC) is an integrated circuit (IC) that integrates multiple components of a computer or other electronic system into a single chip substrate. A SOC may include a shared memory device and multiple CPUs that access the shared memory device for data communication. Accessing the shared memory device with round-robin arbitration, for example, through a shared port may have long and unpredictable latency. A more efficient technique for sharing a memory device among multiple CPUs in a system can result in increased system bandwidth and reduced power consumption.